He’s a Cute Little Boy, but Armed to the Teeth He Almost Ended Up as a Statistic

He was red-headed and freckled, a cute little boy. Even the cops said so.

At his feet was his skateboard--the Kamikaze brand, with red wheels.

In his hands was a Ruger M-14 semiautomatic rifle, with a 30-round clip attached.

But this time, they rewrote the ending. This time, nobody got shot--not even the 9-year-old boy.

He was a deaf child who used his skateboard to smash a glass door of a Long Beach pawnshop Monday night, then slid through a metal security gate, and held off a score of police with an “arsenal” of automatic weapons, angrily pointing the guns at them for nearly an hour, until he strolled out of the store, police said, still carrying the gun, and one of the officers jumped him from behind.

Had to Cut Strap

When he went down, somebody heard it said, he was holding onto the gun so tightly they had to cut the strap to get it away from him.

“Thank God it turned out the way it did. We didn’t have to injure the boy and he didn’t injure anyone else,” said Long Beach Deputy Police Chief Eugene Brizzolara. “So much violence is out there, even a 9-year-old projects a tremendous threat. A little boy could have wiped out a whole block.”

This particular little boy, whose name was withheld because of his age, will not likely be charged, but may face counseling, Brizzolara explained. On Tuesday, he was in the custody of his parents, who had reported him missing not long before the incident began.

The night before the armed standoff, the boy’s parents later told police, he had watched “The Terminator,” a movie in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a well-armed cyborg from the future who, among other things, shoots up a police station in pursuit of his victim. “That kind of gave him the idea,” Lt. David Buchanan said.

Just before 7 p.m. the next day, a merchant in a Long Beach mini-mall called police.

A boy was “acting very bizarre,” pounding his skateboard on the walls of the A & V pawn and gun shop in the 3300 block of South Street. By the time police arrived, he had shattered the glass, squeezed through a folding steel door and made his way to the gun rack at the back of the darkened store, where the semiautomatics are kept.

Manager Stuart Hykes arrived just behind the first police cars, and officers were already hunkered down; the boy was aiming the gun at them. Hykes did not remember seeing the youngster in the shop before, “but he’d almost have to know where the things were” to find them so fast.

From the description, clerk Elinor Cerio said, he may have come in with another boy a few days earlier. They stood gazing at the semiautomatic guns behind the counter before she told them to leave--”you have to be 18. And they left.”

As police watched, the boy rummaged through drawers and shelves, yanking at computer wires, pulling out knives, trying out police-issue handcuffs, a gun belt, even a couple of AK-47 semiautomatic rifles, pointing them at police as he stalked around the store.

Couldn’t Hear Warnings

Police did not know that he was deaf and could not hear their loudspeaker warnings to come out. He racketed around the shop in a rage, smashing and scattering.

And he found the ammunition. “There was,” Police Sgt. Terry Walton said, “beaucoup bullets there in the shop.”

But in his youth or his rage, the boy couldn’t match shells to weapons. Even the clip on the gun he was carrying, it turned out, wasn’t in firing position.

“Everybody was sitting there, waiting it out,” said Hykes, “to see what he was going to do.”

The boy had tossed a couple of semiautomatic rifles out the broken door, into a pile with the gun belt and his skateboard. The SWAT team was in place. A police dog was ready.

And then, at 8 p.m., he squeezed back through the mesh gate and walked out, pointing the M-14 at police.

“Basically, he strolled. He didn’t run or nothing,” Hykes said. “He was looking at the (store) windows as he walked . . . like it was an everyday occurrence.”

Officer Kendall Marshall had hidden in a doorway, and when the boy sauntered by, Marshall grabbed him and wrenched away the gun. “The boy resisted to some minor degree,” and was handcuffed, Brizzolara said.

The gun, and the skateboard, were tagged as evidence.

“I’m just sad about it, that it was just a young boy,” said Cerio, who helped to clean up the disarray on Tuesday. “He was just lucky.”